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@APPanissidi

BERKELEY — More than 100 people can thank a 25-member township dive team that they survived Hurricane Sandy.

“We don’t fight fires. We don’t catch criminals,” said Assistant Chief Richard Zeller. “Something to do with the water — that’s where we come in.”

Zeller, 47, works with township Underwater Search and Rescue Squad 86, an all-volunteer team that operates on $10,000 per year, plus donations.

After the first two calls at 9 a.m. Oct. 29, the squad worked 40-hour shifts without sleep through the storm. It rescued more than 100 people here, in the Parkertown section of Little Egg Harbor and in Barnegat, Zeller said.

The squad broke into four teams, which each had four members, plus a four-member team at its command station in Bayville.

“We had people stuck in houses on roads that were flooded above our waist, and the tide was coming in,” Zeller said.

One rescue involved saving a woman and her disabled husband from their flooding home. The squad used six shallow-bottom bass boats and two personal watercraft to complete the jobs, Zeller said.

Their command station even served as a shelter for as many as 100 people while Berkeley officials prepared space in shelters. Food donated by Walmart in Lanoka Harbor and a grill given by The Home Depot in the Pleasant Plains section of Toms River helped the squad care for those sheltered at the station, Zeller said.

Zeller suffered his own loss in the storm. A 6-foot-thick oak crashed onto the back two bedrooms of the home he rents with friends in Berkeley. The tree left a hole in the roof that let water in and flooded the house. That has left Zeller no choice but to live at the command station, he said.